No Life of Their Own: And Other Stories (The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Book 5) by Clifford D. Simak

with red sand like blasts shooting from the rockets—”
    “Forget it, Marty,” I said. “I just wondered. Sure, I’ll take it.”
    “Chesty will be nuts about it,” said Marty. “He always did like pretty things.”
    Floyd Duncan, veteran chief of the New Chicago office of the Solar Bureau of Investigation, was the first to find the clue in old Eli’s murder and when he found it he didn’t believe it.
    He growled at me when I came into his hangout, but I kidded him along and pretty soon he softened up.
    “This case has got me down,” he growled.
    “No clues?” I asked.
    “Hell, yes,” he said. “I got a clue but it’s worse than not having one because it can’t be right.”
    “What’s wrong with it?”
    “About one hundred years,” he said, rustling papers on his desk and trying to act ferocious.
    “You’re all haywire,” I said. “Years haven’t anything to do with clues.”
    “You ever heard of Dr. Jennings Anderson?” he asked me.
    “The chap who built the sanitarium out on Sunward?”
    “That’s the fellow. Built it one hundred fifty years ago. Doc was all of fifty then, himself. Put every dime he had in it. Thought he could cure the space dopes. For that matter the sanitarium is still trying to cure them, but not getting very far.”
    I nodded, remembering Anderson’s story. The sanitarium out on the Sunward side still stood as a monument to his hopes and humanitarianism. Recognizing the space disease, which regularly struck down the men who roamed the trails between the planets, as a challenge to his knowledge and his love of humankind, he had constructed the sanitarium, had tried to cure the stricken spacemen by use of the radiations which slashed out from the Sun.
    Duncan rattled some more papers and then went on. “Anderson died over one hundred years ago. He’s buried out there at the sanitarium. Folks back on Earth subscribed a pile of money to put up the shaft over his grave. Had to use zero metal. Only thing that will stand up in the radiations.”
    I watched Duncan narrowly, wondering what he was getting at. He was right about Doc Anderson being dead, for I had seen the shaft myself, with his name inscribed on it.
    “We found a brand-new dollar bill on old Eli,” said Duncan. “We checked for fingerprints. Found a lot of them. Money picks prints up fast, you know. We checked all the prints and they all check out to nothing—all except one.”
    He ran blunt fingers through his iron-gray hair.
    “That one print,” he told me, “Is that of old Doc Anderson!”
    “But, look,” I blurted, “that can’t be right!”
    “Of course it can’t be right,” he said. “That’s what worries me.”
    Back in my apartment I opened up the package Marty had given me and got the surprise of my life. For once, Marty had told the truth. The thing in the package really was a sand flask, one of those things the gift shops sell to tourists. Made of brilliant Mercutian sands, some of them are really bits of art.
    The one I took out of the package wasn’t any piece of art, but it was a fair enough piece of work. I put it on a table and looked at it, wondering why Marty would be sending something like that to an egg like Chesty.
    And the more I looked at it, the stronger grew the hunch that there was something wrong. Somewhere something didn’t tie together. This business of sending a sand flask to Chesty Lewis somehow didn’t click.
    So I wrapped it up again and hid it in my dresser drawer. Then I went out and hunted through the shops until I found one just like it. I bought that one and wrapped it up and put it in the mails, addressing it to Chesty in care of a boardinghouse that I knew could get in touch with him.
    Why I did a thing like that I can’t explain, even to this day. It was just a hunch, one of those unaccountable sixth senses that newsmen sometimes acquire. The whole deal had a phony ring, had put me on my guard.
    Back in the apartment once again, I closed the blinds,